Valve Changes Steam Gift Process to Combat Cheaters

Valve is constantly tweaking their rules and regulations in order to combat cheaters, and a few new announced rules involving gifting will continue that trend. Valve released a few new rules regarding gifting and the Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) system earlier today: “VAC and Game Ban enabled games can either be bought for your own account, or gifted immediately. They can no longer be saved to your inventory for trading purposes. If you directly gift a game to someone who gets permanently banned, you won’t be able to gift that game again.”

Maybe CS:GO will finally fall off the bestseller charts?

There are two parts to this announcement. The first means that players can no longer keep VAC-enabled games in their inventory for later. They can either download them to their account or gift them immediately. As part of the statement, Valve stated that cheaters will stockpile many copies of the same game so that when they are caught cheating, they can gift it to a different account and carry on cheating. There are currently over 400 games that use VAC, so this will probably affect some of your favorites.

The other change is set up to combat the same thing but goes about it in a different way. If an account gifts a game and the person who receives it is later banned for cheating, then the person who originally gifted the game will no longer be able to gift that game to anyone else. This obviously is a step to block the same scenario as above, but it could affect people without them even realizing it. If you’re going to gift a game to a friend who you know likes to cheat, you may want to think twice.

Do you think these new regulations will help to combat cheating? Or will cheaters always find a way? Let us know in the comments below.